Don't forget:

1. Make them buy. Fuel is a huge cost to getting a ship off the ground. Plus specialized salvage and specialized tools.

2. Activate their stuff's downside. Stuff breaks -- that's the one thing the savvyhead can count on, right?

Taken together, if I were MC and were privately committed to seeing the savvyhead's spaceship get realized, I'd be making custom moves that imply the savvy is a) barely able to keep things running and b) barely able to find even approximately suitable materials.

They are traumatizing, menacing, charming, etc... mortals? And if so, it's more or less to get Creep?

Their adventures are more or less split between the afterlife and Earth? Or lean towards one more than the other?

Oh! Yeah. So it's not that assigning authority isn't necessary, it's that it's insufficient?

That's crystal clear. Thanks.

Oh wait! Some more tricksy assent-fostering but not strictly authority-assigning stuff:

__ First session MC stuff basically says 'Take what the table has contributed during character creation and run with it'.
__ Ask provocative questions and build on the answers too, same thing.

They still assign authority (in both cases, to the players), but they're tricksy about it. So there's that.

(Of all the great stuff AW has, the first session stuff is some of the best, to me. Being able to show up to a game basically cold and walk out with tons of material is priceless).

Back on topic: I'm really not satisfied with the conflict I see between 'Basically every piece of AW has assigning authority in it' vs 'AW's conversation isn't predicated on assigning authority'. Sometimes, maybe many times, pieces of AW assign authority and do other things as well (eg, your comment that assigning authority is a piece of Seduce&Manipulate). But, like, there's no 'other thing' common to every piece like assigning authority is.

Bad phrasing, Vincent. I'll try again.

Seduce/manipulate is assignment of authority, not the 'thinking differently' that Paul T was looking for, so he didn't really answer his own question as you indicated before. Assume we agree that, per the relationship you've described, any element of system that assigns authority is, by definition, an element of system that fosters assent. You'd know better than me, obviously, so I happily defer to your expertise here. But AW looks like it makes heavy use of assigning authority as the primary way it fosters assent. It actually looks like assigning authority is fundamental to how AW carves up the conversation -- the PCs' responsibility is to say what their characters do, the MC's is to play the world, and sometimes the MC turns questions back on the PCs, etc.

So, what if any assent-fostering elements of AW don't boil down to assigning authority? I listed the Hx rules of character creation as a possible candidate because the rules and examples make explicit that the PCs should work out their shared history together instead of one person just dictating that she left you bleeding or whatever. So there's one, assuming you agree with that assessment. That's tiny, though, and it's pre-play, while I'm looking for stuff geared towards in-play.

If it's not something that can be parsed down into individual elements (like, if it's a confluence of different bits of the system that fosters assent without assigning authority), just say so.

Paul, check this for that technical 'check my work' discussion:
https://plus.google.com/+VincentBaker/posts/atC8kDhSQjU

Of particular note to your questions, maybe:

If it were my job to bring the Big Model current, here's what I'd do:

1. Replace every taxonomy in it with the process or structure that the taxonomy illustrates.

For most of them, this would be pretty easy. Most of them are either trivial, like DFK, or transparent enough, like IIEE. There are only a couple of troublesome opaque ones, like GNS. Maybe only the one!

2. Replace the idea of creative agendas with one that actively resists both taxonomy and RPG exceptionalism.

In this thread I haven't done the work this would require - and if you thought I would, you were dreaming - but I've put forward my candidate and shown that the work is possible.

3. Take the idea that roleplaying depends upon a distribution of authority by the hair, drown it in the mill pond, sink its body with stones, and bring in a cranky New England witch to curse its soul to thereunder remain until Doom's final trump.

This is the easiest of the three, and by far the most important.?

^ agreed with Daniel.

When they take out Rolfball and you want to give them some kind of treasure, instead reveal the contents of his heart and barf apocalyptica at them. You know, show them that trunk Rolfball has among his belongings containing, like, some dead Old Worlder's love letters. Let them find his stack of comics, mostly tattered and burnt but still readable. Or the ash and charcoal portrait sketches he has hidden away under the seat of his truck. Whatever.

edit: oh, and tell them to write it down! Like, they look down at their list of things and it says 'oddments worth 2 barter, an assault rifle, a stack of Old World love letters' and I'll just bet they'll be trying to find some way of introducing that back into the fiction some time later.  Which, you know, just makes it that much more of a cool thing to have found. Way better, imo at least, that finding 'treasure' in the D&D sense.

Jonatan,

yes it's okay to have a mobster on your ambition front and a sickness on your decay front or whatever, even if both are inside the holding.

The rule for creating fronts is to link threats thematically (by scarcity), not necessarily in the setting (like 'inside the holding'). This is so you can have different threats in the same setting ('in the holding') hitting different themes. If the two threats are thematically-related (the Cloverfield monster and its flea monsters probably are) then they go on the same front. If they aren't thematically related (the ambitious mob boss and his hungry gang member) then they go on different fronts. The hungry gang member is on a front with a bunch of other threats that express hunger (the crew that works the primitive greenhouse, the cannibals, that rival holding out on the flats with nothing to their name, whatever).

When you make your mobster threat and create a front around him, some thematically-linked threats will come to mind that are also linked to this mobster (his lieutenant who wants to take over, or that scrappy street kid who's dying to get noticed by the boss and become a made man). When that happens -- great! Add them to the front. If nothing comes to mind and you need to fill up that front with other threats, invent some threats that also express ambition, whether they tie directly to the mob boss or not -- the DA who is running for governor and is making a show by cracking down HARD on the ghetto where the PCs live, maybe? (I know that's a little weird for AW; I'm assuming a Goodfellas-type hack of AW with mobsters and stuff). In the end, you have a front that expresses ambition seven ways to Sunday.

Sometimes you'll have a threat and won't know exactly what front it goes on (that is, you won't know what theme it expresses right off the bat). That's fine too. Throw it on the Home Front until you figure it out.

At the end of the day, you have all your threats organized by theme (as opposed to being organized by how they relate to each other in the fiction, or organized by where they live, or organized according to a million other schemas). This should hopefully make it easier to keep the themes your game is expressing firm in your mind, which in turn will hopefully make it easier to look for ways of expressing those themes. So every time that hungry gang member comes on stage, look for some way of letting his hunger (or someone else's, whatever) shine through by word or deed, for example. No one is going to go through your fronts and complain that you don't have the mob boss and his hungry gang member on the same worksheet. It's really there as a resource to help you, not to lock you into some rigid format, right?

Make sense?

-- Christopher

PS: I guess I should point out that in addition to theme (scarcity), the threats on a given front are also linked by the fact that they impinge on the PCs' lives. The ambitious DA in my silly example above needs to impinge on the PCs' lives (like, she needs to make waves where they live or something, not Back Home On The East Coast or whatever). I'm sure you knew that though, just clarifying.

EDIT -- re-reading what you wrote, I'm positive you already get most of what I wrote. Sorry for mansplaining it to you. I'll just leave it here in case someone else finds it helpful.